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Comment by BitPirate | Hacker News Reader

Controlling a wayland client on Linux is still work in progress: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/56

Partial support has already been added: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/pull/932

Isn't everything Wayland related an everlasting work in progress? Especially thanks to Nvidia not playing ball.

I wish I could switch to Wayland but the amount of gotchas is so huge that if I want every app to work as expected then X11 is still the only way to go.

It doesn't seem so bad right now if you use Sway/GNOME/KDE. I have Wayland enabled on my Intel+NVIDIA laptop and it's been pretty much fine after installing the proprietary drivers.

IDK, I've been on Wayland (via Sway) for about 5 years now, there were a few annoyances in the first few years but now I can't remember when was the last Wayland related thing that I needed to fix.

Screen sharing is a bit challenging but possible. It is not too long when it was impossible.

I have personally a bug when sway does not return from sleep mode, sometimes randomly, and I have to physically power off the pc. It just shows black screen with backlight on.

I guess the issue is on AMD drivers, but it is likely that it will never be fixed. I have no idea how driver bug can cause this on Wayland but not be an issue elsewhere.

So, you didn't notice that video playback in Firefox isn't hardware accelerated and stutters a lot? (Firefox' sandbox prevents itself from creating the OpenGL context needed for hardware accelerated video playback).

Two years ago, the support was added?

https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedor...

Also, enabled by default with Mesa in these days

https://linuxstoney.com/firefox-has-hardware-video-accelerat...

This entire subthread is exactly why I don't believe people when they trout out old linux desktop stereotypes and then handwave and imply they've actually tried it anytime recently. Shocking, in development efforts can undergo lots of change in the span of months, let alone years.

Wayland is a wip (a number of things are being worked on right now that have never even been fathomed for x11) and it's already a significantly better experience in countless ways over x11.

What hardware, though? Do you have a dGPU, play games, etc. We know it works for "desktop" use

I've had it on a few generations of nuc's and an XPS 9590 (where I disabled the nvidia card). I use it for DevOps mostly. So no gaming, don't have time for that anyway.

Amusingly it is thanks to Wayland i can use Linux on my GPD Win 1 handheld[0] - apparently there is a bug in the video driver that when changing video modes can cause the entire screen to shift several lines (probably some memory offset issue, sometimes it even causes colors to go haywire) that needs a reboot to fix.

However since Wayland (or at last KDE's Wayland implementation) doesn't provide any functionality for changing video modes, the bug isn't triggered when running KDE with Wayland as the latter forces games to use whatever video mode the desktop uses.

Of course that means that games that do not support 1280x720 wont work at all, but that's minor details, about as important as using a lower resolution to get better framerates from the Atom iGPU the device has :-P

(ok, actually might be possible by using gamescope[1], which runs its own Wayland+XWayland compositor inside an SDL window that you can also force to use a specific resolution - again no resolution changes are supported and that uses wlroots - that can be scaled to arbitrary outputs and if the SDL you're using has a Wayland backend to avoid going through the desktop's Wayland compositor's XWayland layer then you may not get that much lag at all - though not sure if there'd be enough memory left for the game after all that :-P)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPD_Win

[1] https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope

> Of course that means that games that do not support 1280x720 wont work at all,

On capable hardware (which your's probably isn't, not sure of Intel HD 405 capabilities), it is not a problem. The compositor can allocate a surface that corresponds to a given resolution (higher or lower than physical one, doesn't matter), the application renders its output at its preferred resolution and then compositor scales that buffer (using the output encoder's scaler, not GPU!) to physical output, effectively emulating that resolution.

Well, at least Mutter is capable of doing this, not sure of wlroots.

I have a laptop with nvidia card and wayland runs fine on the laptop screen, but lots of problems with docks and external monitors.

Wayland should be superior on external monitors when compared to Xorg, what kind of issues?

This was on fedora 36... mostly screen will not wake from sleep, but also black lines on the screen, and complete signal mess up where I can barely see what's happening. I tried everything, like switched from hdmi to display port cables, installed latest drivers from nvidia, still it's a mess. Wasted countless hours jerking around with it. It was so unusable and gave up even trying any more a couple months ago. Maybe will try in a few more months because I would really like to use the machine with an external monitor.

I have learned my lesson, and will NEVER buy another nvidia product, not worth the trouble.

It sounds like a driver issue and hard to say what is wrong...

FYI: Nvidia published open-source GPU Kernel modules couple months ago. Maybe there is a brighter future ahead.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc...

Looked around and seems pretty widespread. Links below to many issues, and some now fixed partially. Yeah, let's hope the open sourcing of those drivers make for a brighter future, but still I will do my damned best to never buy an nvidia product again.

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/161 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2166 https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/vgqyv2/wayland_nvidia_... https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1891 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/external-monitor-doesn...

I'm struggling to imagine how it could be superior to Xorg on this... Xorg works flawlessly with external monitors in my experience.

Maybe there's some edgecase that I haven't hit that it fixes?

Monitors are thought as separate instances by design when compared to Xorg. You can run different FPS on different monitors on Wayland, for example.

> Xorg works flawlessly with external monitors in my experience.

Unless your displays are mixed DPI.

Wayland works much better in this scenario.

Sheesh, yeah. Wayland is one of those aspirational things I check in with every once in a while, like Star Citizen or fusion power or the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice. They're nice things to think about, in dark moments, but I don't think one should bet on their successful implementation.

...right?!

Do you actually checkin on it or do you just go off the armchair comments from other folks that clearly haven't tried it anytime recently? Hardware acceleration (webgpu, vaapi, etc in Firefox), support for embedded platforms, mixed mode DPI, 360Hz screen support, fractional (albeit suboptimal for now but perfectly fine) scaling (miss me with complaints about proprietary electron clients), vulkan support, and soon there will be considerably better scrolling support than in x11, maybe even full top-bottom support for fractional scaling the list just goes on and on.

But yeah, if you want to use scale some ancient out of date Electron app, you might have to use Xwayland it might look bad under some compositors. Not really the end of the world. You can even easily use OBS to screen share to those apps these days.

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